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WOMEN’S POETRY
OF THE FIRST
AND SECOND
WORLD WARS
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••simon featherstone
Despite the twenty-five years that have passed since the publication of Catherine
Reilly’s innovative First World War anthologyScars Upon My Heart(1981),
women’s poetry remains a problem for critics of war poetry. Whilst that anthology
and its companion volume of Second World War women’s poetry,Chaos of the
Night(1984), remain standard points of reference, they have not led to a thorough
debate about what ‘women’s war poetry’ might mean beyond a body of war poetry
not by men. There persists a lack of attention to women’s poetry of both wars,
despite the recovery and revaluation of a range of women’s prose writing from
these periods. In the present collection, for example, only two essays concentrate
solely on women writers, and that imbalance is typical of the field. Whilst Virginia
Woolf, Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, and other
writers of fiction and autobiography are securely placed in any account of First and
Second World War writing, no comparable figure has emerged as a representative
female war poet.
In one sense, the reason for the continuing uneasiness about women’s war poetry
is clear enough. Of all literary genres, war poetry is the one most insistently defined
by the voices and experiences of men. Predicated initially upon the heroism and